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A journalist looks at pictures by photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977) who is sitting in Adolf Hitler's bathtub DPA/PA Images
evening sitdown
Your evening longread: The fascinating life of Lee Miller
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
Now, every evening, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
The photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller lived a fascinating – and at times controversial, such as when she was pictured in Hitler’s bathtub after his death – life. This piece explores how she lived but also asks why she hasn’t the reputation other photographers of her ilk had.
(London Review of Books, approx 25 mins reading time)
The teenage Elizabeth had developed on her own the film-inspired, Fitzgerald-like chic that eventually swept her into fashion modelling. Hers was the first generation of well-brought-up young girls to be guided by media imagery; but Miller was unusually suited to it, already accustomed by her father to feeling that her own great value was as a camera’s subject. One could even say that she was urged by him to make a spectacle of herself for it; and fashion and French Surrealism gave her ample scope for that. Lee Miller’s whole sense of visual art was bound up in the camera: she had a technical and psychological artistic sense that was not painterly at all, despite her close friendship with Picasso and many other painters.
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